Funny to think what our taxes go on. I wouldn’t have had ‘the invention of a deity’ on my 2024 government expenditure bingo card, but here we are. The National Maritime Museum, which last year received £20 million from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, has unveiled a statue of a ‘god-like protector of all migrants’ to sit next to a bust of Horatio Nelson. The pair will engage in a pre-recorded conversation in which the gender-neutral god praises the ‘resilience’ of those ‘escaping war’ while moaning about our national hero’s ‘fancy medals and uniform’.
We find a sort of syncretic religion in the National Maritime Museum’s migrant god
There’s plenty to laugh at in this commission. Take the fact that every stakeholder imaginable seems to have been consulted, from the trans charity Mermaids to Action for Refugees in Lewisham, or that the bust seems to have a can of pepper spray placed artfully on top of its head. But what strikes me about the creation of a new god is its sheer weirdness.
What kind of publicly-funded museum, charged with preserving the remains of the past for the benefit of today, decides that coming up with a new deity is the best way to carry out that duty? It seems we’ve entered something of an intellectual wormhole over the last few years and have been spat out into a parallel world of ersatz rationality. Try to imagine how such a decision was made. A curator in some god-awful meeting will have said something like:
Just to circle back, I think we need to centre the plight of migrants more impactfully in our Nelson exhibition. He was an imperialist – and therefore a white supremacist. Those same forces are harming migrants today. Never mind that Nelson had little to do with 18th-century British migration policy, he waged war and war creates refugees. We have a duty to stand up for those same oppressed peoples of today.
Clearly the other curators felt that this argument – or one that sounds pretty similar to it – was compelling. The result is an artefact that tells us much more about our own era than it does Nelson’s. At some point in the early 21st century, reality became fuzzy. What we are witnessing is the confusion of empirical fact with moral sentiment. The concept of validity now applies just as much to the subjective world as it does to the historical record; the invented god of migrants is just as valid as a real British admiral.
Defenders of the museum will say that this is only art, an innovative way to engaging audiences and obviously not a serious attempt to found a new religion. The problem, of course, is where they’ve chosen place this work of art. When entering a museum, you expect to find the genuine remains of the past. Put a piece of contemporary interpretation alongside historical exhibits and it gives that work a status that it would not otherwise have had. And why call the thing ‘god-like’ in the first place? Could it not simply be a representation of migrants?
Again, it’s easy to mock this strange contemporary mindset. But it’s more interesting to ask how it has come about. How did reality become so frayed that an modern artefact has been deliberately set in opposition to history? As with most present maladies, we can point to what technology has done to our minds.
Phones seem to have rewired the way we see the world. Think about what makes it onto your timeline: it tends to be things that are contentious, ideas or images over which two or more tribes can come to opposing conclusions. This clash of views creates emotion, clicks, and ad revenue. The purest and most mundane form are optical illusions like ‘the dress’, which some saw as black and navy blue, others white and gold. But there are more pernicious examples: take the events of 6 January on Capitol Hill. If you’re in one tribe, it was a terrifying attempt at insurrection. In another? You’ll see a mostly harmless, if excitable, protest.
Once you’ve got used to tribal thinking, it’s very difficult to get rid of it. Every piece of news, from airstrikes on Houthi rebels to Mr Potato Head’s true gender, is parsed into tribe-approved narratives. So when you are tasked with presenting the legacy of one of Britain’s greatest naval figures, the temptation to frame the work in light of what your tribe thinks is difficult to resist.
Most of us have experience of tribal thinking, something that has always existed but is much more prevalent when we see tribes fighting it out every day online. But what of the National Maritime Museum’s religious bent? If you’ve read Tom Holland’s Dominion, you might be inclined to see the bust as a kind of bastardised christianity: the divine on the side of powerless, the meek shall inherit the Earth etc. But here, too, we can find a technological explanation: as we become increasingly god-like, the idea of creating deities of our own becomes less strange.
In recent years, unfathomable machines have started to generate the uncanny. Holograms of Tupac and Abba perform in front of real, excited crowds; we control the world around us by talking to cloud-powered microphones and speakers; our phones seem to listen in on our conversations and serve back to us our private interests. AI is starting to surpass human abilities, becoming superhuman. You can chat with it as you do a real person, ask it to complete tasks which it can do better than most recent graduates – it can even create images that seem, at first glance, to be genuine photos.
Intelligence has been embedded in the everyday, changing life into sometime that feels less than real. Meanwhile, a subtle, unspoken sort of techno-animism has crept in. Even if God is dead, the machines are still monitoring our inner lives, machines that we humans have built ourselves. No one seems to quite understand the power that we’ve unleashed, but its one that feels increasingly omnipotent and omniscient. What’s creating a statue of an imagined god compared to using His powers for real?
So technology has created a two-pronged attack on reality. On one side, we’ve become more tribal: social media companies want engagement, that means emotive and contentious content, which in turn rewires the way we perceive the world. On the other, machines are doing things we once thought only possible through the supernatural. The result is a more uncertain vision of what is real and where the limits of human abilities lie.
We find a sort of syncretic religion in the National Maritime Museum’s migrant god: progressive morals have merged with a looser understanding of reality. To some of us, the result will appear absurd. What’s even weirder, however, is that to others, it won’t seem strange at all.
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